


Rather Die Young

by nicasio_silang



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M, unlicensed use of a godzilla-like creature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 21:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1484008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I’m not running across town in the middle of this shitshow so that you can chuck Luna bars at a Decepticon.” </i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mindy and Danny hang out after work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rather Die Young

**Author's Note:**

> Parts of this might be triggering to people with disaster-based PTSD.
> 
> Set sometime after 2x18 ( _Girl Crush_ ).

Danny wants to hang out after work and I’m a grown-ass woman so I’m like, “Sure, I don’t care, whatever. Will there be other people? I mean I don’t care if there aren’t other people, that’s not, I mean, come on, that’s not even, who cares, I don’t, you don’t, you obviously don’t, and that’s sure, whatever.”

“Um.” He blinks.

Behind him I can see the front desk where Betsy is staring at the back of his head from behind a pad of sticky notes too small to cover her nose. I give her some eyebrow.

“So, bar?” I say. “Like 6:30?”

“Um,” he blinks more. Wind bangs at my window. “I’ve got a late client call at 6, but yeah, I could leave by then.”

Which is a frankly fantastic topic change opportunity.

“Ugh, is that the Gruetzmachers again?” I squish up my face. “You gotta get them to stop cruising WebMD.”

Danny melts into some massive gesture, leans against my office door frame.

“I did! Now they’re watching medical mysteries on cable. I got this voicemail about how they’re scared the baby’s actually a tree seedling.”

“Ah, you know what, I saw that episode and that’s actually a legitimate fear. The branches can look like spindly little fetus arms.” My potted plant assists with a demonstration.

“That seems very unlikely.” He’s wandered into the room now. Which is fine.

“That’s what I thought, but! Apparently it happened to the wife of the second Talk Soup host. Guy with the hair. She’s in the medical mysteries episode. _With the tree_.”

“They kept the tree?”

“They’re anti-choice.” Mutual eyeroll. “You should totally see this, though, it’s still on my DVR, you can, you could.” I lose the thread.

It stretches. It snaps.

“Yeah. Yeah, yes, yeah. So, 6:30. Okay.” Danny flaps his coat around and talks while walking backwards out the door.

He’s repeating _okay_ all the way across the lobby and into his own office. The sound of his voice dopplers out. My lungs clench like fists. But that was fine, that went fine. That was probably a win.

 

It’s 7:45 and I’m 9:45 tipsy. Massacred coaster corpses are in a pile on the side table, smaller pieces wedged up under my fingernails. This bar is half-assing a tiki vibe. The fifty TVs along the walls are all on the news, muted, Kristine Johnson down in Battery Park haranguing a sea captain and some cops. We’re shooting darts because Danny’s not at all good at it, but I’m way worse. I send another one into the wall, he shows off all his teeth. There’s thousands. They’re enormous.

“How do you perform surgery with those hands?”

“Okay, for one thing, I very rarely have to shoot a needle at a patient from across the room. So just,” I pause here and down some more seabreeze because I didn’t really have an end to that thought.

Danny collects my scattered darts from the floor.

“I can see you going in for an episiotomy and just missing the patient entirely,” he says. “Stabbing some poor intern in the eye.”

“Please, like they’d be in the room. Interns faint as soon as you say _episiotomy_.”

Danny eyeballs his next shot. He has this whole thing, a stance, rolling a shoulder back, miming the throw four or five times before actually letting it go. He rocks back and forth when he does it, he squints and points at the dartboard with his mouth. It’s warm in here so his jacket is off, draped on the back of the high chair I’m leaning on. I lean, it moves, and I can smell him. On the news, it’s started to rain and the cameraman is running, the image bouncing.

“Danny, what is this?”

His shot goes low. Sticks at the edge of the board inside the wire 6 of the 16.

“What’s what?” He plays dumb. I point at the air between us, the empty glasses, the coaster carcases. “We’re hanging out,” he says. “Because we’re friends. Why, what did you think…?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, I wanted to hang out, I missed you, this just feels weird. Don’t you feel weird?”

“I miss you too.”

That awful thing where his voice breaks so he sounds like a child, which makes it really wrong that it’s hot, but it’s hot. I hate that thing.

“Yeah, well you don’t get to miss me,” I tell him.

“Excuse me?”

He drops out of dart stance. And if we’re doing this, then we’re doing this, I’ve had a few and I have some words prepared. I’m reaching for them when the floor shakes.

Hard, like a giant picks us up, the whole building, jiggles us around, and sets us back down a little sideways. Glass breaks all over the place. It’s been, what, 13 years? But this is Manhattan, even if we’re in midtown. While half the bar is freaking out, the other half gets that look on their faces like _it’s happening again_ and _I knew it would someday_. It shakes again. And then shakes again.

I lose a little time.

Then I’m crouched under the table, there’s crap everywhere on the floor, Danny’s yelling my own name in my face, there are a hundred car alarms screaming out on the street, rain’s blowing in through the broken windows, and I’m saying _yeah_ over and over like Peter accepting toppings on a pizza order.

“Mindy!”

Danny’s got his hand on my shoulder, his hand on my face. Something about those massive, damp palms clamp me into my body.

“What the hell!” I say over the undifferentiated din. “We have to get outside!”

 

Outside isn’t working out. It’s wet, it’s cold, traffic’s jammed in that way where you can tell it’s solid from here to Yonkers. There’s a crowd sprinting uptown like I’ve only seen that one time Ellen tweeted she was at the Korean-Hawaiian food truck in Lincoln Square. People on the sidewalks, people in-between cars in the street. I’m in my pre-and-after-work shoes, the Louboutins I rock on the subway where they get maximum face time, and they’re great, but I’m running like a newborn gazelle. Plus I have no idea what we’re all running from.

The shaking’s getting stronger, the beats coming faster. Danny’s holding on to me by my coat and the ends of my hair. It should hurt, but I can’t feel it yet.

Rude, though.

He says something that’s lost in a pair of helicopters buzzing past way too close overhead. Tries again just as the ground moves again, sharply, and plate glass storefronts all up and down the street shatter. Then there’s all this screaming again and ugh, he’s making referee signals with his arms like I’m supposed to know what any of that means.

I lead him by the shirt cuff out of the crowd and into a 7-11 doorway.

“You left your jacket at the bar!” I yell, because everyone is yelling.

And he yells, “We have to get to the office!”

And I’m pretty sure that’s not a connected thought so I yell, “What? No! Why? What?”

“I have an emergency kit I keep at work!”

“What like, bottled water and a fire blanket?”

“And energy bars!”

“I’m not running across town in the middle of this shitshow so that you can chuck Luna bars at a Decepticon.”

“They’re Clif bars!’

And while that’s a marginally valid defense depending on whether or not we’re talking a fudge or non-fudge flavor, and I was gonna say as much, the whole thing is thrown off-track by some white girl full-on Jennifer Love Hewitt screaming right outside our little nook. Danny asks if she’s okay. She points south, runs off north.

So we poke our heads out and look where she was pointing.

 

I’m not good in an emergency, generally speaking. The first time the office printer ran out of ink, Dr. Shulman asked me to fix it and I bought a new printer instead of learning how to refill the one we had.

Danny is also not good in an emergency, no matter what he says. One time he accidentally (??? seriously how??) shaved off his entire right sideburn, and then he just left it that way for days. Didn’t change the other side or anything. Like _oh well, I guess this is just my life now, looking like a weirdo._ He was just gonna let it grow uneven until his next haircut, months later. I’m steamed just thinking about this.

Anyway, the thing about being doctors is that we basically went to school to collect solutions to emergencies. It’s been mostly vagina- and baby-related emergencies the last mumble-many years, but the basics are the basics.

It’s 9:45 or 11:30 or 2 AM or the end of the world because I lost my phone when I lost my purse so who the hell knows. I also lost my shoes, and without heels this dress gives me the alluring shape of a cinder block. My hair is unspeakable. Danny has his phone, but it died after the hundredth time he tried to call his mom. We’re gross, and we’re cold, but we’ve set two broken bones, tied a handful of arms into slings, and gave the “you’ve got a concussion” speech to three super concussed people. We’re basically agents of SHIELD right now.

Danny, armed with supplies we liberated from a CVS, is trying to tape up a nasty gash this little kid got from some falling debris bouncing off his head. He lost track of his sister earlier in the night. He’s kinda losing it. He’s on my lap, way wiggly.

“I dunno her phone number,” the kid says. He’s worrying a MetroCard between his little hands. “I don’t have my own phone.”

“Join the club, bub,” comes out of my mouth.

I get a look from Danny that I totally object to. I’m no evil stepmother, but this is maybe the second kid who’s ever occupied my lap.

“Hey pal, I never got your name.”

“Muhammad,” he says.

“Oh, yeah? Like the boxer?”

Danny’s got all the blood wiped off now. I’ve got my hands on his shoulders. They’re shivering. It’s not so bad as it looked at first, but it’s gonna be a badass scar that’ll impress the hell out of girls when he’s older. Guys when he’s older, whatever, it’s gonna be cool.

“Who?” he says.

He’s looking around Danny at the dark street and little fires everywhere. How did so much shit catch on fire? Is this much everyday stuff really all that flammable?

“ _Who_? Are you- You’re being funny, right? You trying to be funny?”

“Hey! Hey, little man, can you do me a solid?” I give him a squeeze until he’s looking up at me and the cut is looking at Dr. Bedside Manners over there. “I probably met ten little baby Muhammads in the last three months, and I cannot for the life of me ever spell their names right. I add h’s and m’s everywhere, I’ve screwed up a bunch of birth certificates. Can you teach me how to spell your name? Over and over until I get it?”

He narrows his little kid eyes at me. Like, a lot. Something blows up a couple blocks away.

“You’re a _grown up_ ,” he says.

_Look, dude_ is what I’m starting when Danny butts in.

“Well, barely.” I hate him. “She’s a very young grown-up.” Okay, fine.

We’re still counting m’s when his big sister shows up. She seems decently competent, despite the whole losing her kid brother thing. As they’re leaving, setting off for Lenox Ave, she takes in my bare feet, Danny’s stained shirt with a button missing over his belly, and our collection of stolen drug store first aid boxes.

“If you guys are doing...this? I heard someone, I think, a couple blocks down.” She waves back where she came from. “That thing knocked half a Starbucks over, I think someone’s trapped.”

“Is the thing still down there?”

“Last I heard, it was climbing the Empire State Building.”

She shrugs, way too nonchalant about that prospect, but I guess she was probably 10 years old when Cloverfield came out. This night is to her like the day I need to go into protective custody in a nunnery is to me: not wholly unexpected. We hug Muhammad goodbye, wrap a shit load of ace bandages around my feet, and head south.

Even though there are random fires everywhere, and two broken fire hydrants on this one block, and cracks and booms and rattles every couple minutes, it seems quiet without the traffic. Danny keeps sneaking looks at me.

“Hey remember that time I cut your hair for you?” I ask.

“That wasn’t consensual and I wasn’t okay with it,” he says.

“Well, I thought it turned out really cute.”

“I’m never going to agree with that.”

“Come on! We could die tonight.”

“I can’t fall asleep in the doctor’s lounge anymore, I’m scared I’m gonna wake up bald.”

“Ugh, you’re so ungrateful.”

 

We find the Starbucks.

“Is this a Starbucks?” I ask because it looks like Morgan’s quarry.

“There’s coffee beans everywhere.”

“That could be anywhere.”

“These are all over-roasted.” He crunches some underfoot.

“Oh hey, good point.”

“I guess we should…?” He makes a question mark with his mouth, somehow. I give a sweeping _be my guest_ arm.

This place is on a corner, and was maybe five stories tall. Now it’s just lots of tumbled red brick, lots of asbestos probably, half-walls, and the damp concrete smell that the rain left on everything. Something in the rubble is hissing, maybe a milk steamer. It’s probably too much to ask of the universe for me to find a packet of vanilla bean frappuccino mix lying around, but it can’t hurt to look. I’m picking up random building bits. Maybe girders. I’m not sure what girders are, but these seem like they might be girders.

Danny, faint and farther away than I’d thought, yells for me. We marco polo until I find him.

“Did you find someone?”

“Nope.”

He smiles, nods at something under a low, precarious-looking overhang. He’s making the face he thinks is his sexy face, but is actually his dad face.

“What? Is it a Kuerig machine? I know it’d make the break room less messy, but number one, you’re the last person I’d have thought would engage in looting, and number two, the coffee from those tastes way weird.”

“I’m not looting.”

“It tastes old, you know? Or meaty. God, that’s horrible, coffee shouldn’t be meaty.”

“Technically, we already went looting.”

He crawls under the overhang. He’s rooting around in there.

“Or is meaty like a note? Like how wines are oaky?” I’m addressing Danny’s shoes at this point. “Which, I mean, given the choice between wine and oak, you’re gonna take wine, but between coffee and meat, who the hell wants the coffee instead? Or why not meat that tastes like coffee? Ooh. Hey, I think I’m onto something here. Danny, are you getting this?”

His feet disappear-- he’s shuffling around in a circle. There’s his hair, covered in white dust, making him look more dignified than it should. There’s his face, and all his teeth, all at once. And there’s his hand, cupping a tiny, crying, orange kitten. It’s so small in his hand. He’s smiling so big. This whole night: standing too close in the elevator, squinting while he throws darts, buying a round of drinks, picking glass out of hair, all of it and this is the least fair of it all. On his hands and knees for a goddamn kitten.

“She was in a box of cups,” he says.

“It’s a she?”

“Yeah,” he hands me the cat, starts to pull himself up. “I think I’m gonna name her-”

There’s a grinding sound like molars in an enormous mouth

Everything moves, there’s so much dust in the air. I can’t see him. I lose the cat, the stupid cat jumps right out of my hands.

It’s right here, it’s walking right past us. It’s so big, it’s too big. The street sways. I fall down. I think I’m crying. Danny isn’t saying anything. Something large and noisy is breaking across the street. I fall down, I close my eyes, I try to find him with my fingertips.

 

There’s a lot of blood.

 

It’s gone. It was probably here less than a minute. There’s a lot of blood. These first aid kits are bullshit.

“Danny. Hey, Danny.” I say it a lot. I make sleeves into tourniquets. The wall fell on his shins, which is better than his thighs. He’s starting to make a little noise. “Danny, come on. Danny, Bruce Springsteen has throat cancer. Danny. Danny, I’m getting back together with Tom. Danny. Danny, deep dish pizza is real pizza.”

He coughs a lot, then whispers, “Don’t even joke about that.”

“You have to take these painkillers,” I tell him.

“Is there any water?”

“We’re all out, you’re gonna have to do the tough guy thing.”

He hasn’t opened his eyes yet. His neck is so tense that I can see his pulse there. He nods, I drop the pills in his open mouth, he swallows them. Which is a shocker, I gotta say. This guy usually needs half a Nalgene to get down a vitamin.

“Is it bad?”

I check out the steel girder (girders are huge, it turns out) that’s cutting off the view of his feet. I haven’t been able to touch the mess of his lower legs, shards that are probably his tibia.

“I’m not really qualified to answer that.”

“You are.”

“Everything’s fine.”

“You gotta get out of here.”

“Nope.” I shake my head and it turns into a tic I can’t stop.

“Min, it’s not safe.”

“Everything is going to be fine,” I say.

And I’m human, okay. I put my hands on his hand, I kiss his gross, clammy forehead. He’s cold and I’m cold and there’s nothing I can do about it. What kind of moron leaves his entire jacket at a bar?

“Hey, Mindy.” His breath is right in my ear. “I’m gonna pass out in a sec, but. I love you, okay? I’m sorry, I love you. I’m sorry.”

I’ve gotten dumped a lot. I could say it’s the natural extension of having a healthy, active love life, but it still comes down to: I’ve gotten dumped a lot. And I get it, I do. Not everyone is ready for this jelly.

But this motherfucker.

“Screw you,” is what I say before slapping him across the face, which he looks pretty pissed about.

“What the hell?” Doesn’t look like he’s passing out now.

“You think you’re gonna die?” Slaps make for great punctuation, FYI. “That’s what it takes?”

“I just said I love you!”

“Yeah, so you can have a moment and then die and everything’s okay. Not happening, buck-o.”

“You said everything was gonna be fine!”

“I lied, okay. Everything’s fucked up forever. Some freaking King Kong Kaiju is taking a dump all over midtown, you might lose your beautiful feet, and I can’t see shit because I had to take out my contacts, I can’t even see the stupid look on your jerk face.”

“I thought you said my feet were disgusting.”

“Ugh, whatever, they’re gorgeous, it’s all gorgeous, I was feeling vulnerable.”

“I got a _pedicure_ that week.”

“Holy crap, you love me.”

“Yeah, well.”

He tries to squirm. I hold him down. His breathing’s all weird. The building groans. I feel you, building.

“You broke my heart for no good reason,” I say.

“No good reason, huh. That’s what you think.”

“I think that you think that you’re some shitty person who doesn't deserve to be happy. Well, too bad. I do. I deserve that. You’re all _I love you_ because you don’t think you’ll have to follow through with it, but joke’s on you, buddy, ‘cause you’re gonna live. And then...” I get close enough that his eyes come into focus. They’re open, bloodshot, wet. Good. “Then, when this is all over, you’re gonna _date_ me.”

Just then: fighter jets overhead. Swear to god. I didn’t even plan this.

“Um,” he says.

“You know, if you’re into that."

More jets. Then the earth moves. Danny closes his eyes. And everything’s probably going to be okay, this was probably a win.


End file.
